The main stand at the Feroz Shah Kotla stadium in Delhi is strangely attractive. With advertising covering sloping lines of concrete, it resembles a multicoloured, multistorey car park. At the start of yesterday’s first semi-final in the inaugural Twenty20 Champions League, it had all the atmosphere of a car park, too.

The match between New South Wales Blues and Victoria Bushrangers began under the eyes of a couple of thousand spectators, a source at the ground said. But as it developed and the Blues built a healthy total of 169 for seven that was too good for their Australian rivals, who were restricted to 90 for nine, the stadium filled to half of its 48,000 capacity, which will reassure the organisers.

It has been the pattern of this tournament that while games involving the three Indian Premier League (IPL) sides have been buzzing, it has been harder to sell matches featuring teams from the six other competing nations, even with ticket prices starting at only 200 rupees (about £2.60).

The Diwali match in Bangalore on Saturday between the local side, the Royal Challengers, and Delhi Daredevils was a very noisy sell-out. Games involving Deccan Chargers, the third IPL side involved, were also well attended. But once those three failed to reach the semi-finals, it was hard to interest impartial spectators.

There has been a similar difficulty in attracting television viewers. The opening fixture, between Bangalore and the Cape Cobras, was watched by 0.74 per cent of the Indian audience, although in Bangalore itself the game had a 6 per cent share of the market.

The overall share has gradually crept up to a bit higher than the 1.1 per cent of Indians who watched the opening match of the World Twenty20 between England and the Netherlands in June, but it is short of the 3 per cent that industry sources were hoping for before the tournament. The average audience share for IPL games is about 4 per cent, with the final this year being watched by 8.3 per cent of the audience, or in about 11 million homes.

ESPN Star bid almost $1 billion (about £601 million) for the right to show the Champions League over the next ten years and although advertising sales have held up, with the broadcaster claiming that 95 per cent of slots were sold a week before the tournament, they may have to drop the rates for next year on the back of the viewing figures.

In the UK, Eurosport picked up the rights a few weeks before the tournament. There has been an average audience in this country of 50,000, with a peak of 130,000 for the match between Somerset and Deccan on October 10. This compares with an average of 28,000 that the now defunct British arm of Setanta was getting for the IPL.

A spokesman for Eurosport, which is broadcasting the matches across Europe with commentary in 14 languages, said that the broadcaster was happy with how the tournament had performed given that most of the games have been on in off-peak times and that this was the broadcaster’s first foray into showing cricket.

Today’s second semi-final between Cape Cobras and Trinidad & Tobago is another tough sell, although the Caribbean side have several players with Indian ancestry, which may draw the neutral support.

Speaking to The Times last week, Lalit Modi, the IPL chairman, said it was “extremely crucial for the Indian public that the Indian teams go through”. He added that he was personally more interested in seeing close, unpredictable matches. To that end, he should be satisfied. The cricket has generally been exciting.

Modi denied that free tickets had been handed out. “We could have given away the tickets but we did not do that because we want to build the tournament,” he said. “It is not going to be an overnight issue and it will take us a few years to build this.”

There is an argument that the public’s enthusiasm for cricket in India has been dampened by the saturation coverage of matches. India start a seven-game one-day series against Australia on Sunday, only two days after the Champions League final, and there have already been two global limited-overs tournaments this year, with the third World Twenty20 starting in the Caribbean in April.

This is in part reflected in the news yesterday that the Board of Control for Cricket in India has signed a new four-year broadcasting deal for international and non-IPL domestic matches that will earn it about £110 million less than the present deal with the same broadcaster, Nimbus.